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Comment by Affric | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing about Twitter is how ugly the rebrand is.

I have seen bad rebrands in my life: Far too fashionable. Totally unnecessary. Reactionary.

But I have never seen a company go from good branding like Twitter had (easy on the eyes) to something as ugly as X. I will never bad mouth the branding/advertising/PR guys again.

The logos and colours are hideous. The balance on the whole page is off.

Like there’s the verb he’s thrown away. There’s the awareness. The brand. The goodwill. The safety. But he’s traded it for the least aesthetic choice. It has recontextualised every other redesign I can remember disdaining in my life.

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With every haphazard decision we're getting a very public experiment demonstrating the value of "giving people what they want" vs "everything else". It's astonishing how resilient the network effects behind the product in this case are against sabotage. Good lesson in startups there. You just need to laser focus on creating value for the customer – everything else doesn't matter as much as you think it does? Maybe even by power of 10 factors?

I’m not so sure. It probably matters a whole lot more when you’re starting and nobody is using your app. Twitter would likely had a much harder time catching up if was called “X” and looked as ugly as now..

And even for a mature product it will probably cost quite a bit of money/users longterm

"You may be missing out on ads revenue sharing! If eligible, you must be subscribed to X Premium to receive a share of ads revenue.

Sign up to X Premium to get access."

It looks and feels like a template where someone forgot to pass in the variables.

Or adult content

Or on embedded tweets the X looks like a close button

I made this mistake. Realized it was stupid UX. Then I did it again 5 minutes later.

“Oops our ambiguous UI leads to extra ad impressions”

I’m sure they’ll get right on fixing that!

> It has recontextualised every other redesign I can remember disdaining in my life.

But does it go so far that it even excuses Papyrus? :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

Surely the intent is to replace the verb: “Hey, that’s cool - I’ll X it.”

Never mind that it already has a rather different meaning.

That's one way to see the positive in all of this :)

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